Speed Up Your Google Search With This New Keyboard Shortcut

Google just dropped a great new keyboard shortcut that you can use to refine your search queries, and while it’s not going to save you a week’s worth of time, it’s easier to use than scrolling back up to the search bar, clicking it, and editing your query to launch a new search.

The shortcut is simple and easy to memorise: When you’re on the results page for any Google search, all you have to do is mash the “/” key on your keyboard — a forward slash, if you’re still getting that confused with the other slash on your keyboard — and your cursor will hop back up to the search box and position itself at the very end of your query. You can then add or subtract words, add operators, or do a quick CTRL+A and Delete to start anew.

This trick doesn’t work when you initially load google.com, because it doesn’t have to; as soon as you load the page, your cursor is already primed in the search box, ready for you to type in whatever you want. But when you’re doing multiple searches to dig for something, it’s a faster way to refine your search until you find what you came for.

And while we’re at it, let’s give you a few more shortcuts to speed up your searches. Since you can use your browser’s address bar to launch all of your Google queries instead of visiting Google’s website, simply mash CTRL + E or CTRL + K whenever you want to go looking for something on the web. If you’re not on a website that has already taken over either keyboard shortcut for a different purpose (like, say, adding a hyperlink the text of a blog post), then your cursor will immediately jump to an empty address bar so you can kick off your search.

I’ve tested this in Chrome, Edge Chromium, and Firefox, and it works swimmingly. If you’re a Safari fan, however, you’ll need to mash Command + L. That’s just the way it is on macOS. If you mash CTRL+L (or ALT+D) in Chrome, Edge Chromium, or Firefox, you’ll jump to your address bar and highlight everything there — a slightly different setup than clearing it all out to perform a new search.